Tim Collard is a retired British diplomat who spent most of his career in China and Germany. He is an active member of the Labour Party.

The Chinese are betting on infrastructure as Beijing switches to the 'Shanghai model'

There may be nine million bicycles in Beijing, as the song assures us; personally, I think the lady is working with out-of-date figures, as the old velocipede is nowhere near as ubiquitous as formerly. What is certainly true is that there are now four million cars, which presents rather more of a problem.

The road-building programme has been quite impressive – six concentric ring roads as against three in 1989 – but it is nowhere near keeping pace with the growth in traffic volumes. Accordingly, the eight-lane boulevards criss-crossing the city resemble faintly undulating car parks during the two-hour morning rush hour, the three-hour afternoon rush hour, and most of the weekend. I rather suspect that many people are driving their cars as a status symbol – bicycles are so Third World, and public transport so proletarian – rather than because the car gets them to their destination more quickly, because it almost certainly doesn't.

Fortunately, the city fathers have got something right. Stimulated by the approach of last year's Olympics, they put in place a huge extension programme for the Beijing Underground. Ten years ago there were only two lines, which meant that for most parts of the city the tube wasn't much help. Now there are half a dozen, giving pretty decent coverage all over the city and out to the burgeoning suburbs. And it's a delight to use, if you can stand the crowding; lovely clean stations with working escalators, trains running like clockwork at proper intervals, no breakdowns, functioning doors and ticket machines – all the advantages of a system which is two or three years old instead of 150. And a ticket to anywhere on the system costs 18p. Public transport looks like coming into its own just before the roads seize up altogether.

The Chinese are betting heavily on infrastructure as the foundation for long-term economic growth. This follows an intense debate within the post-Mao leadership about the way forward. The father of reform, Deng Xiaoping, set up the "Guangdong model", based on the special economic zones on the border with Hong Kong. Broadly speaking, it consisted of removing government interference and government controls, giving the private sector its head, and letting infrastructure look after itself – if private industry needed it, private industry could buy it. Deng's death left the leadership to Jiang Zemin and his friends, most of whom hailed from around Shanghai. The "Shanghai model" was different; much more government-influenced, much more planned and controlled, grounded on the provision of an infrastructure on which industry could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the backing for the development of this region came from Singapore.

Now Beijing, which as the political capital was always more staid than swashbuckling Shanghai, has gone for an extreme version of the Shanghai model. It will be interesting to see how well it prospers. It couldn't, of course, be more different to the principles by which the USA operates; as the two giants of the 21st century face up to one another, we will see how the two systems compare.